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GIS Cooperative Meeting

City of Tucson - Information Technology

Friday August 10, 2001

10:00 AM - Noon

Present: Donald Ijams, Dave Hochede, Russell Riblett, Jack Avis, Cheryl Van De Beuken, Mike Honomichl, Christine O'Connor, Sam Camacho, Teri Schultz, Ike Shaffer, Paige Hamner, Steve Dorfman, Dan Falkner, Bob Czaja, Sandy Elder and Joe Jacoby

Year in Review - GIS in the City of Tucson

Todd Sander, City I.T. director, spoke about the national attention the GIS Cooperative has received during the past year. PTI (Public Technology, Inc.) has named the Cooperative one of the Year 2000 Top 25 Technology Solutions. Civic.com magazine placed the Coop as one of the top 50 initiatives for State and Local government.

The City Manager, as shown by the video played, brought this national recognition to the attention of the Mayor and Council during their August 2001 meeting. All have the effect of making more people aware of what the GIS Cooperative is about and what we are doing.

In addition, the level of interest of local senior officials in GIS was demonstrated in the last City budget process; there were never any questions regarding the value of investments in this area.

Significant extensions of GIS into local government occurred during the 2000-01 fiscal year. A number of departments and offices ventured into GIS for the first time (e.g., Finance, Historical Preservation, Solid Waste Management, Information Technology). Other departments and offices (e.g., Economic Development, Transportation, Police, Environmental Management, Water) expanded their use of GIS technology in major ways.

Year in Review - GIS Cooperative

Don Ijams began the review by noting the widespread use of GIS products and services throughout the City. With Ike Shaffer's assistance, he described the number of City Employees who have live connections to the shared City/County GIS Library server (MARS). As of August 2001, 88 individuals in 11 City departments and offices had network connections between MARS and their desktops:

City Manager/Special Projects 1

Community Services 1

Economic Development 2

Environmental Management 1

Information Technology 12

Operations 3

Planning 9

Solid Waste Management 5

Transportation 37

Police 2

Water 15

These are only the primary connections to the GIS Library - many other workers in various departments and offices use layers updated from primary users.

Christine mentioned that broad GIS education in upper management and resource commitments from the City will help to expand GIS to other levels and to develop GIS infrastructure.

Major accomplishments of the GIS Cooperative during the past fiscal year include:

Building the City of Tucson GIS infrastructure

Purchase/Install central GIS/Web hardware platform

Purchase/Install central GIS/Web software platform

Initiate master address data structure and update process

Sponsor GIS/City Information Portal Project (called CityScan)

Increase central I.T. staff GIS related training/skill

Purchase/use professional GIS consultation

Maintain a GIS related web site

Improvement of City staff use of GIS

Sponsor/support desktop GIS software training

Introduction to ArcView

GIS Concepts Course

ArcGIS Related VBA Training

Purchase/deploy 10 copies ArcView 3.2

Purchase/deploy 31 copies ArcGIS 8.1 upgrade

Support GIS workers attendance at training conferences

(URISA, ESRI Users Conf, Az. Geographic Information Council )

Monthly GIS Cooperative Meetings - current events, product demos, new City apps

Provide peer-to-peer troubleshooting/access/tips

Participation and sponsorship of GIS community collaboration

Close working relationship with Pima County, Arizona departments:

- DOT Technical Services/GIS

- Development Services - GIS/Addressing Section

Support of Tucson Community Technology Education Network

- Purpose: to foster spatial-based education in the Tucson community.

Background: "Increasingly, neighborhood associations, community organizations, K12, and informal educational programs are becoming aware of the value of public data, but the expanded use of this data by the non-technical is still a challenge. The initial effort behind the Tucson Community Technology Education Network (TCTEN) grew out of a GIS cooperative between various agencies in the city and county government to share GIS data. TCTEN's role is to get this data to the public. But since that beginning, it has become much more.

Dozens of community organizations, education institutions and member of the local government now share their thoughts and plans at monthly meetings, and the project has become more one of technology education in general, with youth, neighborhoods and adult education as targeted populations. There is an emphasis on reaching low-income neighborhoods, at-risk youth, and small businesses."

Dr. Robert MacArthur, U of A, Chair

Core GIS Issues

Address scrubbing: Jack Avis, of Pima County Development Services, provided a handout that summarizes the address scrub. The first page assesses 13,000 problem addresses (out of more than 300,000) that were placed into subgroups for corrective action. Results of work on these problems are shown on the second page. All problems have been identified, much correction work has been done and further corrective action has been forwarded to the appropriate people. Jack's office will continue to monitor the progress.

Rubber Sheeting: Steve Whitney was not in attendance, but provided an update. He indicated that the rubber sheeting preparation should be complete sometime this month. Once he returns, the layer adjusting process can begin, to bring several hundred layers into better relationship with orthophotos of Eastern Pima County.

CityScan Project Update

David Hochede made a visual presentation showing the prototype web information portal using GIS for enhanced access to City datasets.

The first major effort for IT was learning the GIS-related tools and programming languages necessary to create the site. Large enterprise ArcIMS and database servers have been installed and development has begun. Similar government sites were reviewed and that information has been used to help develop the local one.

One good idea was that layers available for display were arranged in logical groups. There are issues with validity of some layers, such as cultural sites (what is considered a cultural site?), where to find data, as well as who maintains it.

Don indicated that most City data are not on MARS but in City data files. The data structures being build for CityScan will provide part of the infrastructure for enterprise-wide spatial enabling of City data. Initial efforts toward linking data into the central GIS database will focus on crime data and business/occupational license data. The rich store of 2000 Census data now coming down the track will also receive attention.

GIS 2001-02 Budget and Plans

The GIS Cooperative budget for FY 2001-02 is $209,840. Some of the things this budget will be spent on are:

Conferences: The Coop sponsors people for attendance at conferences such as URISA, AGIC, SWUG and the ESRI Users Conference.

Consultants: A GIS consultant contract will be available to anyone in the City.

Computer equipment and software: These resources are primarily for central GIS expansion and resolution of processing bottlenecks.

GIS Training: A number of employees will need GIS-related training in the upcoming year, not only for ArcView 3.2, but ArcGIS 8.1 as well. People who already own the previous version and upgrade may not need extensive training, but those who are starting off on 3.2 or 8.1 will require separate introductory training experiences.

GIS Software

The GIS Cooperative purchased 10 copies of ArcView 3.2 last fiscal year for distribution throughout City government. Eight of the copies have been distributed at this time.

Also, the Cooperative purchased and distributed 31 upgrades of ArcGIS 8.1 to 10 different City departments and offices.

GIS Consultation

The Cooperative will be funding a contract for general purpose, on-call GIS consultation this fiscal year.

GIS Conferences

The Cooperative will be funding attendance at GIS related conferences and training events throughout the year. A form is now available to request support and to describe justification for GIS Cooperative funding support.

Other Business

The next GIS Cooperative meeting will be held on the second Friday of September, September 14, 2001. The meeting will stay with the shortened time of 90 minutes, but will move the start time back 30 minutes so as to not lose people at the lunch hour (10:00 AM - 11:30 AM).